Tess Scholfield-Peters is a Sydney-Eora based writer and academic currently based at the University of Technology Sydney, where she teaches across the Creative Writing programs. Tess began her writing career in community journalism, helping to start the independent legacy newspaper Urban Village based out of Surry Hills. She completed her Honours in Creative Writing at UTS and began her Doctorate in Creative Arts the following year. Her research is focused on life writing, creative non-fiction, Holocaust studies, memory and empathy studies.
In 2020 Tess won the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies Norman H. Sims Prize for Best Student Research Paper, for her hybrid essay ‘I can hear them, I can see them; the power of the epistolary ‘virtual presence’ in long form narrative’. In 2022 Tess was a National Library of Australia Summer Scholar. She worked for six weeks at the National Library in their special collections for her research project ‘From Berlin to the Bush: Jewish Youth in Rural Australia 1939’. In 2023 Tess received a commendation for her entry in the Australian Association of Creative Writing Programs / University of Western Australia Press First Chapter Prize for the first chapter of her unpublished manuscript. In June 2024 her first book Dear Mutzi was published (NLA Publishing).
Other interests include long blacks, multi-day hikes with no reception and anything pasta related.
